‘The Mastermind’ is a cool, detached character study – part heist movie, part existential drama. It reminded me of ‘The Holdovers’, not just for its 1970s aesthetic but for its focus on privileged people quietly drifting through life.

Josh O’Connor plays an out-of-work carpenter who decides, almost on a whim, to rob a local art museum. It’s not a slick, ‘Dog Day Afternoon’-style caper – more a spontaneous act of self-destruction by a man who’s lost his purpose. There’s no meticulous planning, no grand payoff, just an impulsive crime that unravels almost immediately.

What’s fascinating is how the film refuses to play as a conventional thriller. Once the robbery’s over, the story becomes a slow, uneasy meditation on guilt and identity. The carpenter tries to reinvent himself, to disappear, but it’s clear he hasn’t thought any of it through. He’s not a mastermind at all – just a man adrift, out of his depth, trying to run without knowing where to go.

O’Connor gives a subdued, inward performance – we never quite know what’s going on behind his eyes, and that’s the point. He’s a man raised in comfort, the son of a judge and a mother who bankrolls his failures, but utterly lacking direction. It’s a study of someone cushioned by privilege yet incapable of responsibility.

The film lingers on mood rather than plot. Its pacing is slow, even hypnotic, with long silences and an almost documentary realism. By the time the ending arrives – abrupt, underplayed, and strangely inevitable – it feels less like closure and more like an afterthought.

‘The Mastermind’ isn’t a crime film so much as an anatomy of failure – about how intelligence without purpose curdles into recklessness. It’s haunting precisely because it offers no catharsis, just the hollow echo of a man who thought he was clever and discovered, too late, that he wasn’t.